GenAdmin. Colin Charlton
suited my interests and strengths and my desire to contribute to the programs in which I work. I’m also a collaborator; I work best when I can talk through ideas with others, and that seemed to be a particular offering of WPA studies. This could be because I was doing my work in a big program with lots of WPAs who worked closely together, so I saw the collaborative work environment I desired modeled by the faculty in my program. Taking what I knew of myself and what I wanted and how I worked best, I really didn’t see any other option than making WPA studies a central part of my graduate work.
Kate: For me, becoming a WPA never felt like a big, life altering choice but rather the unfolding of decisions and choices along the way that, while substantial, weren’t a direct path to writing program administration. I chose to leave my first doctoral program because I felt a huge disconnect between my teaching and prospective dissertation research and wanted to spend more time teaching before outlining a research trajectory that would likely map my career. A few years later I chose to leave my high school teaching job because I understood many of my beliefs about teaching and felt driven to return to graduate school to earn the PhD that might make my beliefs about teaching and learning matter more than to a few sections of composition or literature classes, that might have larger impact on students stuck learning five-paragraph essays and thinking they have to guess what the teacher wants. I also went back because I knew that as a woman I didn’t get listened to that much when it came to raising concerns about writing, agency, and gender in the high school I taught in. I wanted to have more influence on designing curriculum and helping students gain a sense of agency from learning about writing and rhetoric. As a doctoral candidate, I learned how WPAs use their disciplinary knowledge to design, develop, and teach curricula that engage students in thinking and learning in potentially powerful ways. My commitment to writing program administration became a commitment to rhetoric and often a commitment to reform.
Jonnika: During that first year of my PhD program, I took two WPA courses, and it was pretty clear to me early on that many of my peers were in those courses because they knew that one day they might have to be a WPA. Only a few of us were there because WPA work was our passion. That summer, I presented at my very first CWPA conference, and I began my paper, an argument for WPA professionalization, with a line that has been at the heart of my work ever since: “I choose to be a WPA.” In that statement was the idea that drives this book for me. The fact that I choose to be a WPA, that I am a WPA even when I don’t hold an official WPA position, defines a large part of who I am.
I took four WPA classes, I wrote a WPA dissertation, and when I went on the job market, I sought out WPA jobs. Advice to steer clear of those jobs until after tenure were deeply offensive to me since, emotionally, that advice registered as an affront to my worth as an academic, to my education and experience as a WPA, to my professional identity.
Kate: I never took any WPA classes, and I wrote my dissertation on the rhetorical canon of memory. Honestly, it didn’t occur to me to write a WPA dissertation. I simply hadn’t read enough WPA literature to realize I might want to make that choice. My doctoral institution was small, and we didn’t have courses about WPA work. Instead, I came to WPA through service and my interest always in the big picture: I was the assistant director of the program, co-taught the TA practicum, and found I really liked teaching and mentoring teachers, and I wanted to make that central to my daily work. When I went on the job market the first time, I chose to apply for both WPA jobs and non-WPA jobs, and my first job cemented my WPA career. I’m not sure I could have chosen other than a WPA job and gotten it in a geographical region my partner and I wanted to live—the so-called more desirable route to tenure—but since I wanted a WPA job, I was happy to get one. And I really enjoyed working with TAs, collaborating with colleagues, and contributing to developing an undergraduate composition program. I wasn’t advised to steer clear of WPA jobs, though I was advised to carefully consider the do-ability of any job. When I left my first WPA job, in part because it felt untenable—too big, too many worries that I couldn’t get tenure because of its scope (I had worries of my own and didn’t feel comfortable with other people’s worries on top of my own)—and because we wanted to live in the west, I chose to step into an actually bigger WPA job—a directorship—at a smaller school. While we can never know what we choose when we choose a job, on that search I felt like I was choosing—a certain kind of WPA in a certain kind of school, in a particular place. I already had a job, and felt like I could choose a new one or stay at the old one. The first time on the market I felt like I had to take the best job offer rather than the best lifestyle choice for me.
Tarez: I was drawn to WPA coursework and projects because I enjoyed the kind of intellectual engagement they provided, had been a WPA prior to my PhD program, served as a gWPA in graduate school, and in many ways think like a WPA. I identify with the role and its potential for institutional and social reform because it seems like a natural outgrowth of (or parallel space to) my identity as a rhetoric and composition scholar and practitioner, not because I felt inclined to identify with a subject position or a group called WPA. Writing program administration problems and questions are the discipline’s problems and questions, just as much as other theoretical or historical or methodological commitments become the shared property of us all. (Here, I don’t mean to forward the argument that one is a sub-field of or supra-field to another, simply that I do not view my work in histories and theories of rhetoric and composition as cut off from the same intellectual onus that drives the work I do with course administration, TA mentoring, and curriculum development. And vice versa.)
This may be why I have been drawn to Generation Administration as a historical and geospatial identifier more so than to WPA as a label or a subject position. I did not leave my doctoral program hoping for a WPA job, but simply hoped and expected that I would continue to mentor teachers and develop curriculum in a dynamic program, at the hub of core issues and trends that shaped or disrupted the broader university context.
Amy: The WPA courses that I took as a graduate student taught me how to think like a WPA. I began graduate school with an interest in language and grammar (having spent two years working as a copy-editor for an investment company before beginning my PhD), and while my dissertation was about grammar instruction, it had a particular WPA bent, examining the ways in which decisions made by WPAs in TA training and curricular development push grammar out of the first-year writing curriculum. I could have focused my study on classrooms alone, but because I was trained to think like a WPA, I knew that what happened in the classroom was directly influenced by how a program was constructed, so for me, writing about grammar pedagogy necessarily meant that I had to talk to WPAs, too.
Colin: I was actually able, in retrospect, to overlap all of my final classes and my dissertation with programmatic questions that emerged for me as our writing program underwent a massive change from a two-semester sequence to a single five-hour course that had a serious rhetorical-technological dimension. I worked with professors, new teachers, and students at the undergraduate and graduate level to try to understand the dynamics we were putting in place, from conferencing to computer classroom pedagogies to my obsession with challenging expert-novice narratives of education in writing classrooms. Without taking any WPA classes (though I did occasionally peek at Jonikka’s course packs) and with a position as a graduate mentor, WPA concerns emerged in all aspects of my doctoral experience. But this was in large part due to my desire and choice to work with particular people and not a connection to an area of study.
Jonnika: My relationship with the concept of choosing WPA has not always been an easy one. When I took my first tenure-track job, I still felt like a WPA, I wanted to be a WPA, but I wasn’t the WPA, and that hurt my feelings. One of my new colleagues had taken on the WPA position in a pinch the year we came in, and while he certainly proved himself to be a capable steward of the program, his true interests lay elsewhere, and, emotionally, that was hard for me. I didn’t take over the position for a couple of years, and in the interim, I had a bit of an identity crisis. If I wasn’t the WPA, who was I? A WPA scholarly agenda, a strong WPA mentor, and WPA friends helped me see that my WPA identity was more complex than I had realized. I will always be a WPA no matter the circumstances.
Kate: At my current job, I am the WPA. I try to both resist and deploy the notion that the connotes for me—the only one. Technically, I’m not, as there is a Basic Writing Coordinator, a Composition Coordinator, a Writing Center Director, and an Associate